Monday, December 31, 2012

Does
Newton’s law of inertia undermine Aquinas’s First Way? The short answer is No. I gave a longer answer at pp. 76-79 of Aquinas. I give a much longer answer still in my paper
“The Medieval Principle of Motion and the Modern Principle of Inertia,” which I
presented last year at the American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting
in St. Louis and which is now available online in Volume 10 of
the Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics.
Follow the link to read the paper, which is followed by a response from
Michael Rota and my rejoinder to Mike.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

[This] is no ordinary book of apologetics. Edward Feser is a professional
philosopher of an analytic bent whose main body of work is in the fields of
philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and
economic theory. Thus, alongside a number of scholarly articles, Feser has
published introductory volumes to contemporary philosophy of mind, John Locke,
Robert Nozick, and, most recently, Thomas Aquinas. He has edited the Cambridge Companion to Hayek (the Austro-British economist and philosopher) as well. Feser’s qualifications allow him to
prosecute his case with a philosophical sophistication that is not found in
many apologetic treatises. One might say that as a Christian apologist Feser is
overqualified…

Friday, December 14, 2012

Our
look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind
and Cosmos brings us now to philosopher of science John Dupré, whose
review of the book appeared in Notre
Dame Philosophical Reviews. The review
is pretty harsh. At his kindest Dupré
says he found the book “frustrating and unconvincing.” Less kind is the remark that “as far as an
attack that might concern evolutionists, they will feel, to borrow the fine
phrase of former British minister, Dennis Healey, as if they had been savaged
by a sheep.”

The remark
is not only unkind but unjust. At the
beginning of his review, Dupré gives the impression that Nagel is attacking neo-Darwinian
evolutionary biology per se. Dupré writes:

Darwinism, neo- or otherwise, is an
account of the relations between living things past and present and of their
ultimate origins, full of fascinating problems in detail, but beyond any
serious doubt in general outline. This
lack of doubt derives not, as Nagel sometimes insinuates, from a prior
commitment to a metaphysical view -- there are theistic Darwinists as well as
atheistic, naturalists and supernaturalists -- but from overwhelming evidence
from a variety of sources: biogeography, the fossil record, comparative physiology
and genomics, and so on. Nagel offers no
arguments against any of this, and indeed states explicitly that he is not
competent to do so. His complaint is
that there are some explanatory tasks that he thinks evolution should perform
that he thinks it can't.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Back in
February of 2011, I gave a pair of lectures at the Faith and Reason Institute at
Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA. I had
no idea until just the other day that the lectures are available on YouTube and
apparently have been for some time. (I
thank the anonymous reader who called this to my attention.) You can view them here:

We have a superb understanding of how
we get biological variety from simple, living starting points. We can thank
Darwin for that. And we know that life in its simplest forms is built up out of
inorganic stuff. But we don't have any account of how life springs forth from
the supposed primordial soup. This is an explanatory gap we have no idea how to
bridge.

Science also lacks even a
back-of-the-envelop [sic] concept explaining the emergence of consciousness
from the behavior of mere matter. We have an elaborate understanding of the
ways in which experience depends on neurobiology. But how consciousness arises
out of the action of neurons, or how low-level chemical or atomic processes
might explain why we are conscious — we haven't a clue.

We aren't even really sure what
questions we should be asking.

These two explanatory gaps are
strikingly similar… In both cases we have large-scale phenomena in view (life,
consciousness) and an exquisitely detailed understanding of the low-level
processes that sustain these phenomena (biochemistry, neuroscience, etc). But
we lack any way of making sense of the idea that the higher-level phenomena
just come down to, or consist of, what is going on at the lower level.

Friday, November 23, 2012

The cardinal
virtues are wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. They are so called because they are
traditionally regarded as the “hinge” (cardo)
on which the rest of morality turns. We
find them discussed in Plato’s Republic
and given a more given systematic exposition in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.

For Plato, these
virtues are related to the three main parts of the soul and the corresponding three
main classes in his ideal city. Wisdom
is the characteristic virtue of the highest part of the soul -- the rational
part -- and of the highest class within the city, the ruling philosopher-kings. Courage is the characteristic virtue of the middle,
spirited part of the soul, and of the soldiers who constitute the second main
class in the city. Moderation is the
characteristic attribute of the lowest, desiring part of the soul and of the lowest,
productive class of the city. Justice in
turn is the proper ordering of the three parts of the soul and the city, each
doing its part.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

In the
previous installment in this series of posts on Thomas Nagel’s Mind
and Cosmos, I looked at some objections to Nagel raised by Brian Leiter
and Michael Weisberg. I want now to turn
to Elliot
Sober’s review in Boston Review. To his credit, and unlike Leiter and Weisberg,
Sober is careful to acknowledge that:

Nagel’s main goal in this book is not
to argue against materialistic reductionism, but to explore the consequences of
its being false. He has argued against
the -ism elsewhere, and those who know their Nagel will be able to fill in the
details.

Sober then
goes on to offer a brief summary of the relevant positions Nagel has defended
in earlier works like his articles “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and “The
Psychophysical Nexus.” As I emphasized in
my previous post, keeping these earlier arguments in mind is crucial to giving the
position Nagel develops in Mind and
Cosmos a fair reading. Unfortunately,
however, having reminded his readers of these earlier arguments of Nagel’s,
Sober immediately goes on to ignore them.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

It’s time, I
think, to repeat something I’ve said
before. I get lots of reader feedback -- in the form of emails, combox remarks,
letters, and so forth -- and (apart from the scribblings of the occasional
nasty crackpot) I appreciate all of it.
But I’m afraid that I am able to respond to very little of it. I get long and detailed emails asking various
philosophical and theological questions, people requesting that I read
manuscripts or help them get something published, people raising detailed
criticisms of my work and asking for a response, people asking for advice about
which books to read or which academic programs to consider entering, people
requesting spiritual or other personal advice.
In one case a got a request for help in getting a movie made; in another
I had a reader turn up in my classroom out of the blue wanting me to sign a
book. I also get people in the blog combox
asking me to answer various questions or to respond to various objections. Sometimes I feel like Harry Tuttle. It is simply humanly impossible for me to
respond, in detail or even at all, to most of these requests. I’m sorry, I wish I could, but I simply
cannot.

Monday, November 12, 2012

Yes, the election
was a disaster and does not speak well of the state of the country. But just as 1980, 1984, 1988 and 2004 were
not guarantees of perpetual Republican hegemony, neither were 1992, 1996, 2008,
or 2012 harbingers of a Democratic Thousand Year Reich. R. R. Reno’s very
wise advice is (among other things) to calm down and don’t over-interpret the
results. Megan McArdle also offers some
useful reflections.

UPDATE: The election saved ObamaCare, right?It's not that simple, says John C. Goodman, who argues that the "flaws in ObamaCare... are so serious that the Democrats are going to
have to perform major surgery on the legislation in the next few
years, even if all the Republicans do is stand by and twiddle their
thumbs."

You might
recognize the name of atheist blogger Chris Hallquist, who styles himself “The
Uncredible Hallq,” from an earlier
post. I there characterized him as “unliterate”
on the grounds that while he is capable of reading, he does not bother to do
so. (Hallquist had egregiously misrepresented
something I had written in an earlier post, and made some silly and false
remarks about what was and was not covered in my book Aquinas
while admitting that he hadn’t read more than 15 pages of it.) But it seems that was not quite right. It may be that, like Otto in the movie A Fish Called Wanda (to borrow an
example I used in The
Last Superstition), Hallquist does
read; he just doesn’t understand.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

So, it’s time
for recriminations. Whom to blame? I nominate Chief Justice John Roberts. Not for Obama’s victory, but for ensuring,
single-handedly, that the consequences of that victory will be as devastating
as possible. For the future of Obamacare
now seems assured. The Affordable Care
Act is the heart of the president’s project of radically transforming the
character of the American social and political order. As Justice Kennedy put it, the Act “changes
the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in [a] very
fundamental way.” It was rammed through
Congress in an act of sheer power politics, without bipartisan support and
against the will of the American people.
It is manifestly unconstitutional (Roberts’ sophistical attempt to show
otherwise notwithstanding -- more on that presently). It is a
violation of the natural law principle of subsidiarity that will
exacerbate rather than solve the problems it was purportedly intended to
address, and it has opened the door to an
unprecedented attack on the freedom of the Catholic Church to carry out its
mission. And it will massively increase
the already staggering national debt. Roberts,
a conservative and a Catholic who no doubt personally opposes the Act, had the
power to stop it, the constitutional basis for stopping it, and indeed the
moral right and duty to stop it. And instead
he upheld it, leaving the election of a new president the only realistic alternative
way of stopping it. Now that path too is
closed.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.